So wait, let me get this straight- you don’t think the GOP should exist as an alternative party to the Democratic Party, for people who are not liberal or progressive to choose? Okay, I disagree 100%. I think it is an institution worth saving.

Is the KKK worth saving as an institution for people who insist on being bigots? Should we have a Nazi party for all the anti-semites? Or should we try to move beyond this kind of outmoded thinking and into a world of justice and equality? I do not champion such institutions as being worth saving.

Let me say, too, I don’t think the Democratic Party should exist, either. Both major parties are corrupt beyond saving, and neither serves the people to whom it panders. I look forward to the day when we have real choices in America, not false choices granted to us by the oligarchy.

Second point- third parties are a complete waste of time. Voting for people who can’t win will not change the system. Our system is set up for a two party system.

What do you base your logic on? What science supports the idea that votes do nothing but elect a person? Votes are our voices, and we say a lot more with our votes than just which candidate we’re backing. We say what we believe. We shape the conversations of the future with our votes.

Let’s look at one of the people you mentioned as being a great Republican of yesteryear: Abraham Lincoln. Do you know that the abolitionism Lincoln supported originated in the Free Soil Party, and that the Republican Party was forced to make anti-slavery concessions when it absorbed the Free Soil Party it into it between 1854 and 1856? Do you know that it enabled anti-slavery Democrats and Whigs to come together to oppose slavery? In order to get all of these members into the emergent Republican Party, it had to agree to an anti-slavery platform. Without the Free Soil Party, it’s not clear that Lincoln would have ever been elected, or that the Republican Party could have emerged as an anti-slavery force in the mid-1800s.

So, you see, when third parties become large and powerful enough, they force the hand of the major parties. They force concessions. They force the major parties to do right by the voters. They force progress. It is convenient to ignore history and offer platitudes such as “third parties are a waste of time,” but it that doesn’t make such baseless, counterfactual conjectures true.

Third point- Clinton has much deeper and broader support than about half within the Democratic Party. At no point was she ever below 65% saying they’d vote for her in the Fall, even at the height of the fight with Bernie. Most of us are quite fine with our selection.

I actually provided a link, which I see you didn’t bother following. It was to hard data assembled by Pew. You claim to speak for “most of us,” but 50% of her voters are voting against Trump, not for her. That’s what the actual data says. I don’t really care what your personal opinion is; I am an advocate of science, of evidence-based reasoning, and the evidence isn’t with you.

Finally- no, money is not the root of it all. In fact, most money in politics is not corrupt at all. Some major donors just give to all major candidates, others give it to people with a demonstrated record that they agree with. Either way, saying the reason for the GOP’s woes is money is to ignore the complicity of their voters. Donald Trump raised nothing. He barely even ran a campaign. He won because their base voters want a culture war. I know it’s much more comforting to say the oligarchs have bought off the system, but the lunacy of 2016 is a product of the voters.

Yes, money is the root of it all. The candidates in the major parties are corporate shills, bought and paid for. This is not even up for debate. Again, the data confirms this. If you want to talk about the complicity of their voters and this notion of a culture war, how do you explain Latino and minority voters voting for the same candidate as white power extremist voters? Do Latinos in America want to go to war with themselves? 14% of the Latino vote is going to Trump right now. That’s not 0%; you can’t just erase them because you want to and then blame everything on a “culture war.”

It’s also funny how you bring up how he “barely ran a campaign,” yet fail to acknowledge that there, too, money drove the outcome. Trump got immense free coverage by the major media outlets, because Trump and his shenanigans generated revenue for them. They made out like bandits giving him free press. Regarding Trump’s run, the Chairman of CBS had the following to say:

You are right that some of the Republican voters do want a culture war, but not most of them. 55% of them just don’t want Hillary Clinton in office. A huge majority of them would love to have been given candidates in the primaries that weren’t corporate sell-outs, pandering religious fundamentalists, Pyramid grain silo conspiracy theorists, or bloviating bigots, but that’s all they had to choose from. They chose the bloviating bigot, and he probably wasn’t even their worst candidate.